1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to an image forming apparatus, a control method for the image forming apparatus, and a storage medium.
2. Description of the Related Art
With a rapid increase in functions in an image forming apparatus, it is necessary to update firmware of such an image forming apparatus quickly and efficiently (at low cost). Conventionally, when a need arose to perform an update due to a version upgrade or a problem, a service person would visit a customer and manually perform the update. Therefore, not only was it impossible to perform the update quickly, but it took time and money to dispatch the service person to perform the firmware update.
Accordingly, recently, a technology has been proposed for performing a firmware update by configuring the image forming apparatus so as to store the firmware on a rewritable storage device, such as a flash memory, and transmitting the firmware via the Internet.
For example, Japanese Patent Application Laid-Open No. 2006-72761 discusses a technology relating to a portable electronic device capable of communicating with an update server via a communication line. The portable electronic device discussed in Japanese Patent Application Laid-Open No. 2006-72761 performs an update by automatically accessing the update server at a predetermined timing, requesting an update, and receiving the firmware transmitted from the update server in response to that request. Further, the portable electronic device discussed in Japanese Patent Application Laid-Open No. 2006-72761 stops firmware reception when the voltage in a battery source drops below a predetermined value.
In addition, like in Japanese Patent Application Laid-Open No. 2006-221224, a method has also been proposed in which a version upgrade is automatically performed based on the reception of an e-mail from an information providing server, or by setting in advance a version upgrade time. In this method, since the latest software can be automatically determined, the target software can be upgraded to the latest version without a user having to perform a special operation.
Thus, recently, instead of the method in which the service person manually performs a firmware update, it has now become mainstream to automatically perform an update on a personal computer (PC) or an image forming apparatus by downloading firmware from a server.
In a device that provides a plurality of functions like an image forming apparatus, the functions that can be used can change based on the configuration of option devices and licenses that are installed at the user's discretion. More specifically, although functions such as saddle stitching and bookbinding of a document are available for users who have installed a finisher option, such functions cannot be used by users who have not installed the finisher option. Similarly, for a job lock, the functions that are available differ depending on whether the user has purchased an image analysis kit or not.
When the methods discussed in Japanese Patent Application Laid-Open Nos. 2006-72761 and 2006-221224 are used, a version upgrade can be performed on a device by periodically accessing a software server and finding the latest software. However, since the software provided from the software server includes corrections and function improvements for various functions, this may result in the user performing corrections for functions that he/she cannot use.
Version upgrade processing in an image forming apparatus requires consideration to be given to the download time and the time taken to overwrite software, including the processing to restart the image forming apparatus a plurality of times. Consequently, the period while the version upgrade processing is being performed becomes downtime, which causes problems such as making it impossible to receive faxes and preventing print processing of the data transmitted from the PC from being performed.